Countdown: H Hour (4 page)

“I have agreed,” she said, “which is to say I have agreed, tentatively, to your . . . your
firm’s
conditions. ‘Double or nothing.’ And ‘all you find, all you keep.’ I don’t care about the latter and the former appeals to me. An agreement, however, is not my husband back in my bed. Tell me how you intend to get him back when the police and the army cannot.”

Terry liked—no, he
admired
—that kind of directness, and said so. He then added, “I trust you will not be offended if I am equally direct, Madame?”

“Not at all,” she answered.

“We believe,” Terry began, “that one of your children—”

“Without proof of guilt,” Mrs. Ayala interrupted, “I cannot allow you to interrogate any of my children.”

Terry shook his head in negation. “We don’t want to anyway, not as long as there’s a chance one of them would inform the kidnappers that we’re here, or if their disappearance would.”

“On the other hand,” Lox asked, “if we obtain that proof?”

“I’ll heat up the irons for you myself,” she said, old eyes flashing with young fire. The brief flash subsided; the eyes softened. “I have seven children, after all, but only one soul mate. There must, however, be proof before I will permit it.”

“Fair enough,” Terry agreed. “That said, if we have the proof we also, most likely, have the location where your husband is being held. So it may not be necessary, anyway.”

“Necessary or not, if one of my children is responsible, I want that one dead.”

“We don’t have any problem with that,” Terry agreed. He had to work to keep surprise out of his voice. In his, admittedly limited, experience it was the rare wife who preferred husband to offspring.
But, then again, she did use that word, “soul mate.” This does not make her more trustworthy, however.

“Do you have any idea which of your children might be responsible?” Terry asked.

“I do,” Mrs. Ayala admitted. “I will not tell you my suspicions, however. That will be one of my checks on whether you identify the right one. Please continue.”

Terry nodded and tapped a pocket. “I have what I believe is a fairly complete list of people who may know something about your husband’s disappearance. Once the rest of my initial team flies in, we will analyze that and pick a list of likely lucrative targets.”

“Your initial team will consist of?”

Terry almost said, “Fourteen,” the true number coming in, including himself and Lox. He decided, all things considered, that it would be better to have some force available of which his employer was not aware.
Not like I have reason to trust her, after all.

“Eight,” he lied, adding another partial lie, “All intelligence specialists.

“Once we have a narrow list of likely targets, we’ll kidnap, interrogate, and almost certainly kill them. We have to be a bit careful,” he added, “because if we start too low it may warn off those who are higher placed, while if we start too high, it may alert those actually holding your husband that someone is on their trail. This could cause them to move him to someplace no one has any clue to.”

“I don’t see a solution to the problem,” Mrs. Ayala said.

“We’ll try to restrict ourselves to the peripherals, the journalists and politicians who are in bed with the Harrikat.”

“And if that doesn’t work?” she asked.

“Then it would be hopeless,” Terry admitted, cautioning, “my organization never offered you more than a best chance.

“In any case,” he continued, “we have to assume we have some success. So, assuming that we do, the better part of a battalion sets sail sometime in the next forty-eight hours from our base to here. They should be here in about five weeks. By then we should have Mr. Ayala’s location pinned down with some specificity. We recon; we plan; we attack to free him.”

“You will need some assistance before then.” It was not a question.

“Yes, Madame,” Terry agreed. “And we will do precisely nothing but analyze until the money is in escrow. Since you’ve accepted our offer of ‘double or nothing,’ that comes to seventy million USD. As for what we need; Mr. Lox?”

Lox began to reach into a pocket to produce a shopping list of sorts.

The Filipina put up that same bejeweled hand, palm forward, and said, “Don’t give it to me. I am leaving Pedro with you for the duration of your contract. He can get you anything you need, within reason. Think of him as our . . . liaison. He is one of only two of my bodyguards that I absolutely trust. The other one is at the gate. That one will accompany me to my home when our business is finished. Pedro has a car, a taxi I had him purchase—yes, it’s properly licensed; you never know—and will take you anywhere you need to go, or do anything you need done, that requires a degree of camouflage. In addition, there is an old estate in Hagonoy—Pedro will take you there—big enough to house the few of you coming initially in considerable secrecy. A small boat comes with the estate. It is also isolated enough—by which I mean
very
isolated, that no one is like to hear anything from a . . . shall we say . . . ‘rigorous’ interrogation. There is also a very small airstrip.”

Lox sent Welch a glance that as much as said,
I dunno about you, but
I’m
impressed.

“Well, of
course
you’re impressed,” Paloma Ayala said. “My husband didn’t marry me just for my bygone looks.”

“Madame,” Lox said, in Tagalog, “I assure you; you are just beautiful.” He meant it. Even great age could permit and retain its own kind of beauty.

“And I didn’t marry him because of his flattery,” she snapped back.

CHAPTER FOUR

If the highest aim of a captain were to preserve

his ship, he would keep it in port forever.

—Saint Thomas Aquinas

MV
Richard Bland
, Georgetown, Guyana

M Day, Incorporated, owned a dozen freighters of varying sizes. Only two of those had really mattered, so far. These were the MV
Merciful
and the MV
Richard Bland
, the latter named for one of Biggus Dickus Thornton’s boys, killed in action during a boarding mission. While the other ten had, typically, three members of the corporation (or members of the regiment, if they were alone among themselves) aboard; usually the skipper, his exec, and the engineering officer, the rest being hirelings from anywhere where manpower came cheap,
Merciful
and
Bland
were fully corporate crewed. They had to be for the kind of things they did.

The other ships might run the odd questionable cargo. They might, even, with a little switching of crews, support an underwater demolition team to, say, mine and sink a large number of boats and ships bringing fortification material, rockets, and mines to Gaza under the guise of humanitarian aid. Typically,
Bland
and
Merciful
launched armed attacks from ship to shore. Of course, they also carried innocent cargoes frequently enough to disguise their purpose.

Though about of a size, each carrying just under twenty-eight hundred TEU, and a bit over thirty thousand gross registered tons; where
Merciful
had a single gantry that moved fore and aft,
Bland
had three cranes, one forward to port, the other just abaft the beam, to starboard, and a third, centered, just behind the superstructure that housed the crew, overlooking the eighty-foot rear deck. It just wouldn’t do to have to give up the use of one, once compromised, because it looked too much like the other.

The paint helped there.
Merciful
was painted up in a montage of clasping hands, olive wreaths, and doves, suitable for the purely fictive humanitarian organization that, so far as a records check would have showed, owned it.
Bland
’s hull above the waterline was a straight gray, though darker than Navy gray, with the superstructure painted white. Both hull and superstructure showed enough streaks of rust to ensure the ship didn’t stand out as a combat vessel.

The rust bothered the crap out of
Bland
’s new skipper, Captain Tom Pearson, even if he understood and agreed with the purpose. Standing a couple of inches under six feet, broad in the shoulders, balding, Pearson looked at a minor rust stream marring his command’s white superstructure and scowled.

Pearson, new to the ship, didn’t know yet what the vessel’s problems might be. He was
still
trying to locate all the property alleged to be there on the secret manifest.
Bland
hadn’t been used as an assault carrier in some twenty-nine months; there just weren’t that many missions that called for a complete naval invasion. It had gone through the number of skippers, and had had at least one complete crew change because of the Gaza flotilla mission.

Still sneering at the rust, Pearson thought,
Maybe it’s necessary, but it’s just not
right.
Ah, well, at night, at least, it doesn’t show much. Which is . . . ah . . . important, what with the fucking
Army
showing up. Though if that were the only problem . . .

Though the regiment was just the regiment, members of its air and naval squadrons still tended to think of themselves as “Air Force” or “Navy,” and the ground components as “Army.” The two exceptions were Cazz’s Third Battalion, which thought of itself and was thought of as, “Marine,” and Biggus Dickus Thornton’s team of former SEALS, who were in the “Army” portion—Second Battalion—but generally worked with and for, and still thought of themselves as, “Navy.”

Though, at least, we’ll be getting Charlie Company, Third Batt, which ought to know its way around a ship.

“Ahoy de
Bland
,” Mr. Drake called up from his small Guyanan Revenue Authority watercraft. The boat was, of course, intended to help him improve Guyanan revenue. Perhaps it did. From Drake’s point of view, though, its major purpose was helping him do a pretty good side business on his own. This had gone way past turning a blind eye to M Day’s activities for a little financial consideration. Since his daughter, Elizabeth, had married into the regiment, the customs officer had become an unindicted coconspirator.

Not dat de regiment don’ pay fair for meh trouble
, Drake mused, while waiting for an answer from the deck of the ship, looming above.
But it not so important as watchin’ out for meh little girl . . . even indirect.

A dozen people, none of them uniformed, sat the boat behind where Drake stood at the wheel. These were three each from the Aviation Squadron and Charlie Company, Third Battalion, plus four from Alpha Company, Second, and two from the regimental medical department. Drake’s next lift was to bring out the first four cooks, a couple more each medics and nurses, two aviation maintenance crew, and A and C companies’ armorers.

Still seated on a none-too-comfortable bench, A Company’s exec, Captain Tracy P. Warrington, tall, slender, mustached, and graying, looked up at the
Bland
with distaste.

My whole fucking family, for about a dozen generations back, was Navy. I joined the Army to avoid it. So where am I? About to board a ship to sail to points not particularly well known. Fuck.

Bastard Welch, sticking me with this shit while he goes gallivanting to the Philippines to do something I’m better at—Human Terrain Analysis—and ducking what
he’s
better at.

Still . . . I suppose politics intrudes and, given the client, we had to put highest rank forward. Oh, well; I didn’t make the world—or make it start falling apart. I just have to live in it.

Warrington let out an audible sigh.
And with the people in it.

“Stand by, Customs,” called a voice from above. “We’re lowering a ladder.”

Warrington heard a scraping, followed by a splash.
When they say ladder; they mean ladder. Oh, my aching, weary bones.

Glancing in the direction of the infantry company commander tasked to support the operation, Warrington asked, “Cazz brief you people on shipboard customs and courtesies?”

“Yes,” answered Andrew Stocker, late of the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, now commanding—pending an anticipated change in the personnel system—an A Team of C Company, Second Battalion, which team provided the leadership of C Company, Third Battalion, M Day, Inc. The team itself tended to be Commonwealth: Canadian, Brit, British Gurkha, Aussie, and Kiwi. Supposedly, that anticipated change would come sometime soon, with a break in the command relationship between the teams and Second Battalion, with the teams falling directly and permanently under the battalions of the companies they led. The current system had seemed promising, but had never quite worked out.

“Why?”

“Because I don’t know shit about them,” Warrington answered. He pointed his chin at the general direction of the splash. “That means you go first.”

The ship had been modified in a couple of significant ways. For one thing, there were reinforcements built into the deck and gunwales to allow the crew to set up landing pads for helicopters. For another, the two bottom levels of containers contained nothing but food, cots, bedding, arms, ammunition—to include one container labeled “APERS mines”—and equipment for a strike force. Of those levels, the lowest was only partial, leaving a substantial open area—roughly nine hundred square meters—with containers held on steel beams above it, to allow for a mess and planning area for the embarked force. Since the area also served as a sort of recreation center, one wall—actually just the ends of forty-foot shipping containers—held a wide screen TV which was turned on only at night or at the commander’s discretion. Currently, the television displayed one of the more attractive female talking heads from CNN, though the sound was turned all the way down.

“The message I got was cryptic, at best,” Pearson said. “What are you bringing aboard and what’s the mission, Major?”

There can be only one captain aboard ship.

Stocker smiled wickedly at Warrington, seated across the table in the expansive mess hall down near the bilges.
You can send me up the ladder first, but
you’re
in charge and
you
get to brief.

Warrington shrugged. To Pearson he answered, “The mission’s a hostage rescue. Under the circumstances, we can’t grab counterhostages which, frankly, blows. We don’t know yet where the hostage is being held, except that he’s probably still somewhere in the Philippines. We don’t know what kind of force the people holding him can muster. Our advance party is trying to answer those questions, even as we speak.

“As for what’s coming aboard . . . a lot less than I’d like. One infantry company; Stocker, what’s your strength?”

“One hundred and eighty-six officers and men, including three armored car crews with vehicles, two mechanics, seven cooks, and a six man medical team,” the Canadian answered. “Three armored cars and crews are what they gave us. But with only a single LCM, that can only carry two, one of them is probably useless.”

Warrington had already known that; the answer was for Pearson’s benefit.

“In addition,” Warrington continued, “I’ve got thirty-eight from A Company, Second Battalion. The rest are already forward or moving there. We’re also taking on one UAV, two helicopter gunships and two CH-750 STOL fixed wing aircraft—”

“So we’ll need to assemble a flight deck?” Pearson interrupted. “Which means we’ll need to practice it. A lot.”

“Yeah,” Warrington agreed. “The flyboys will include fourteen flight crew and eighteen ground, including for the UAV, which is something less than generous. We’re getting one LCM-6, with a crew of five. Yeah, just one, so I hope your stash of rubber boats is adequate.”

“I’ve got eighteen Zodiacs,” Pearson replied. “Ought to be enough. Yes, with motors. At least I’m
supposed
to have eighteen. I’ve only found seven so far. My predecessor in command was possibly not as organized as one might have liked.”

“Which possibly has something to do with why he got moved to staff,” Warrington said.
I hope to hell all eighteen are there.

“Lastly,” Warrington continued, “regiment is sending us with a seven-man medical team, three more cooks, and a four-man intelligence cell. All told it comes to two hundred and seventy-five. You have space and rations for that many?”

“For twice that many,” Pearson said, “though that
would
be a little cramped.” A trace of doubt clouded his features. “I was hoping for a patrol boat to defend the
Bland
.”

“Yeah, me, too,” replied Warrington. “My boss asked for it. Regiment said, ‘Fuck off.’ Along with a couple of troop carrying helicopters. Also, ‘Fuck off.’ And one of the mini-subs. Likewise, ‘Fuck off.’ Be a bitch if it turns out we need them.”

“Be a bitch if we had them and lose our home base because of it,” Stocker said. “Eh?”
And my local boys are not even a little bit happy about being dragged out of their own country, which everyone suspects is about to be attacked, to sail to some other country about which they know nothing, to do something they really don’t give a shit about.

Through multiple decks, through the sound insulation provided by five to six layers of forty-foot containers, Warrington could still feel the vibrating whine of the central, starboard side, crane, lifting some cargo—
Probably one of the Elands
—aboard.
That, or maybe the troops’ baggage. No matter, that’s the “Navy’s” problem so long as it all gets aboard. My problems, on the other hand . . .

Warrington turned his attention to A Company’s chief medic: Gary Cagle, short, very nearly as wide in the shoulders as tall, and with only one good remaining eye and a pronounced limp, both injuries the result of being shot down in a helicopter, somewhere over Chalatenango, El Salvador, in the late Eighties.

“Fuck . . . fuck . . . fuck,” Cagle said, small drops of sweat flying from one quivering hand, said hand pointing at the contents of what was supposed to have been a twenty foot refrigerated container. “Fuck.”

“It’s
all
bad, Gary?”

Cagle’s head and hand dropped simultaneously. His hand “silenced,” the quiver moved to his voice. “It’s been sitting there, in oven temperatures, for anywhere from two weeks to six months. I just can’t tell. Would
you
want us to shoot you up with any painkillers or antibiotics that have been sitting in an oven for up to six months?”

Warrington shook his head. “Put that way, no. What do we do about it?”

“Incinerate it and get more,” answered Cagle’s wife, Beth, standing slightly behind Warrington in the passage formed by containers. She went by the handle of “TIC Chick,” for Toxic Industrial Chemicals, and knew whereof she spoke. She was also chief doctor for the enterprise, and, where drugs and medicine were concerned, her word was law.

“That, and get a storage reefer that works. Or get this one fixed. I’ll see if regimental medical has sufficient to spare, but I can tell you now that they really don’t. Neither does Guyana, all things considered.”

“Here’s the really messed up part,” Warrington said. “Before I came here I checked up on the mess stores. Three dozen forty-foot reefers, every one of which is humming. We’ve got twice as much food as we need. And
this
one, the one
key
one, has gone tits up . . . ummm”—Warrington’s face reddened—“pardon me, TIC Chick.”

“I’ve heard the word before,” she said.

“Yeah . . . I suppose. Anyway,
this
one, the one we really need, is fucked . . . ummm –”

“Heard
that
word before, too.”

The bridge was lit only by a faint red glow as the first of two CH-750’s allocated to the mission touched down on the temporary angled flight deck constructed atop the topmost layer of containers. The pilots and ground crew had had a lot of practice by this time. A light touchdown and two bounces and the thing was stopped, not more than a couple of feet past the flight deck’s midpoint. Three minutes after the engine stopped, its wings were folded; its propeller oriented upper left to lower right; its tail was turned around; and a four-man ground crew was easing it, ass end first, into the container where it would reside until needed. Unseen, two of the ground crew tied it down to half-rings welded to the inside of the container.